Other Traditions by John Ashbery

Other Traditions by John Ashbery

John Ashbery appraises the lesser-known poets who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work. In lectures on John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert, Ashbery shows how these writers shaped both his own poetics and the broader trajectory of twentieth-century literature.

Other Traditions is an entertaining and shrewd little bookTo begin with, the life stories of the six poets he discusses are all amazing. Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur and the lectures are full of delightful anecdotes...The lectures also provide abundant hints about Ashbery's own method. As he readily admits, poets when writing about other poets frequently write about themselves. -- Charles Simic * New York Review of Books *
[Ashbery] at his most accessible. -- Taylor Antrim * New York Times Book Review *
A pure pleasure to read. Ashbery is a keen and knowledgeable commentator, paying graceful homage to these artists' work, to his own history as a poet and reader, and to the rich mysteries of poetry itself...a quiet triumph. -- Lisa Beskin * Boston Review *
[Ashbery] has chosen [the six poets] for the inconsistency in the quality of their work, often due to turbulent lives, and often the cause of their obscurity. But he unearths their shining moments, examples of their best, most lasting poems. He untangles their lives from their work, their obscurity from their talent and their importance to us from their obscurity. -- Susan Salter Reynolds * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
Recklessness (and in some cases, fun) is the salient feature that connects the six little-known and disparate writers that Ashbery chose to discuss in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures...In his analysis of [the poets], Ashbery is particularly alert to what is 'askew' in their work, to the ways they throw the reader 'off balance,' to the 'fertile short-circuiting' of expectations that their best poetry achieves. -- Mark Ford * New Republic *
Ashbery's lectures reveal his extraordinary curiosity and stamina as a reader; he is willing to wade through tedious stretches of verse and revisit a poet's work frequently, with nothing to go on but the memory of having once been stirred. -- John Palattella * London Review of Books *
Ashbery can be a difficult writer to get to grips with. His long unspoolings of memory, bewilderingly jarring fractured narrative, swings and lurches from one register to another, and a vocabulary which can range from the high-flown to the demotic within a single sentence, are both unsettling and invigorating. -- Michael Glover * Financial Times *
Where others have deconstructed and codified, Ashbery is intimate and revealing, be the subject England, Romanticism, Brooklyn, Marxism, Nashville, or Modernism. In each essay, he attempts to grasp and convey the strange originality of each writer's work, providing a 'user-friendly' set of illuminating commentaries about the legacy and dignity of writing and the nature of truth and poetry. -- Scott Hightower * Library Journal *

John Ashbery (1927–2017) was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received dozens of other awards and honors, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, and every major American poetry prize. Stephanie Burt is the author of fourteen books of poetry and literary criticism, including Super Gay Poems. A past judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, she serves as a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Raritan, and other publications. She is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780674302440
ISBN 10	0674302443
Title	Other Traditions
Author	John Ashbery
Series	The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Year published	2025-09-16
Number of pages	176
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.